


Graft

by ensou



Category: Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Homelessness, In fact not a great situation at all, Not a fix-fic, Realistic, Self-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-11-02 13:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10945767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ensou/pseuds/ensou
Summary: A girl is stranded in a place she does not belong.





	Graft

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is an experiment. Something different. I wanted to try my hand at an SI story. But not one of these CYOA where the protag gets world-breaking powers. Not an SI with little knowledge or selective knowledge of their pasts (most of which centers around the world they are in).
> 
> I wanted to write a person, with a history, a life, relationships, torn out of their place and forced into another. A _real_ person, with faults and flaws, with emotions and memories and problems, trapped with no idea of return and only getting by with what they know and have.
> 
> This will be a self-insert. But it’s not going to be like other self-inserts. This is going to be a realistic exploration of what it would be like in such a place.
> 
> Names other than my own have been changed, of course.

I woke slowly.

For a moment, I wondered why I was sitting, and then I remembered I had been working on a Parallel & Distributed project until 3AM on campus, and had decided that instead of walking home I’d rather just sleep on the chair I’d been sitting on, as tired as I was. Campus security didn’t like people doing it, but they also hadn’t told me off about it. Yet.

After rubbing my eyes and yawning, I looked around. The giant glass wall on the first floor of the CS college building which my chair’s back was to faced east. Dim light showed through it and I estimated it was seven-ish. I placed my backpack which I’d been hugging in my sleep on the ground, yawning again.

Looking forward through the glass wall on the other side of the fifteen-foot hall, it didn’t appear that anybody had opened the club room I basically lived in when I was on campus yet, as the room was completely dark. I’d had swipe access the year before, able to open and close up what had been a labroom, but I wasn’t a mentor or in an admin position this year, so I had to wait for another member who did have access to come and open it up.

And then I did a double-take.

The new furniture layout we’d decided on about a week before was back to how it had been. The couch we’d gotten to replace the old one at the end of my freshman year was gone, the old beige one back in its place. And the banner we’d put up in the top-left corner of the glass wall with the club’s logo and name was gone.

_What…?_

I blinked again, and rubbed my eyes.

Still the same.

Everything else was the way I expected, all of the cloth lounge chairs where they belonged in the hall, it was just that room that was wrong.

I stood up and walked across the hall –leaving my backpack behind next to the chair– and peered into the room through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The seven shelves holding a multitude of outdated and old computing books was where they had been before the “library” had been dismantled a month ago. …Except they were missing the Library of Congress catalog-number labels I’d personally put on all of them my freshman year as a project.

There was no silly satirical poster proclaiming MVC as the official design pattern of the club (which is funny because MVC is an _architectural_ pattern). The old Political-Correctness-o-meter was at the back of the room on the whiteboards. Everything was off.

The first thought I had was that this was a dream, somehow. But it was too real, too _sharp_ , with none of that fuzziness, that malleability and sense of random potential that my dreams held.

“We don’t usually open until seven-thirty, and mentoring doesn’t start until eight.”

I looked to my right, and stared at the girl swiping her ID card through the card reader to open the door.

It took me a moment to place her, since it had been nearly four years since I’d seen her last.

_Donna?_

President of the club my freshman year.

_What the fuck is going on?_

I struggled to form a coherent sentence and waved my hands in denial. “Ah, no, that’s okay. I was just looking.”

She nodded and pushed the door open, sticking the door-stop in to keep it open and flipping on the lights for the room.

In a daze, I turned away from the glass window to walk back to my backpack, and halted mid-step, staring out of the huge glass wall that I’d had my back to until now.

There was snow. There was fucking snow on the ground, in mid-October.

Now, that wasn’t totally unexpected in upstate New York. But snow in mid-October was still rare enough that my friends would have been talking about it for at least the past three days based on the forecast. And I’d heard _nothing_ about expected snow.

Thoroughly unnerved, I continued forward towards the chair I’d been sleeping in, pulling my phone out of my jacket pocket, turning it on and staring at the lockscreen. 

I didn’t have a signal. Neither WiFi nor CDMA.

Frowning, I pulled my laptop out of my bag and opened it. Logging in, I got the same result: no WiFi connection. And when I tried to login to the school network, it refused to accept my credentials.

My confusion only getting worse, I instead logged into the guest network. And sighed in relief when it worked.

Shifting focus to the multitude of browser windows I had open, I created yet another new window, and was satisfied when the Google search page came up. …With the [old serif logo](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Googlelogo.png).

_What._

A sinking feeling settling over me, I typed in ‘date’ and hit enter.

And froze.

Tuesday, February 8th, _20 fucking 11_.

No. Nonononono.

Backspacing the search term frantically, I typed in ‘news’ and anxiously waited for the page to load.

Politics. World. Technology. Local. Everything you’d expect.

…Except there was another section named ‘Capes’.

My curiosity got the better of me.

“Alexandria explains West Coast Protectorate team shuffle.” “Icebreaker interview in Denver.” “New Orleans Ward being reassigned to Miami.” “Scion saves Indian village from flooding.”

My eyes flickered back to the first, stuck on _Alexandria_.

Dread ran through me as I clicked the link.

I didn’t even need to read the article. There was a picture, right at the top. A young woman in an outfit that looked like _Black Lantern_ meets _Supergirl_. A black and steel-grey suit with a black skirt. A lighthouse on her chest. Black knee-high boots and elbow-length gloves. A black cape. A steel helmet that still allowed brown eyes to be seen, with a scar running over the left one.

It was a costume like you’d expected to see in the _Avengers_.

 ** _Fuck_ me.** It wasn’t just 2011.

I was on Earth-Bet.

* * *

“Ah. Hello?” I greeted.

I’d had to wait forty-five minutes –which I’d spent first in a daze, just sitting there, and then devouring everything on that news page I could find and getting utterly lost in the task– but at eight o’clock the SE department office had opened.

“How can I help you?”

A receptionist that I’d never seen before sat behind the front desk.

“Um, I was wondering if I could use your phone?” I asked. “My cellphone’s not working.”

“Sure. It’s over there,” she said, pointing down the right-angled counter to where a generic office phone sat.

Hesitantly, I walked over to it and picked up the receiver.

Once I’d gotten over the shock and utter terror that I was now in a world that was canonically considered grimdark, and was supposed to end in five years, my thoughts jumped to my family.

Were they still alive? Did I even exist here? My sister?

My parents hadn’t had Facebook profiles yet, so I couldn’t check that, and the web address that I’d used in high school was giving a DNS error, which honestly could just mean that I was fucking around with my server, since I’d run my own DNS server then. My sister would have only been eleven, so she wouldn’t have been on Facebook either and was thus also a no-go.

I didn’t check to see if mine existed.

If I’m being totally, brutally honest? I was afraid of the answer.

I cautiously punched in the numbers for my mother’s cellphone.

Two rings, and then the third cut off mid-way. “Hello?”

I froze. It was my mother’s voice. The chances of that… of her getting the same phone number here as I knew… Well, if this was a dream that wasn’t so unlikely.

I pushed the thoughts out of my head.

“Um, hi?”

“Katherine? What is it? I just dropped you off. Did you forget something?”

Oh god. Shit. God fucking damn.

She recognized me. Not only that, but she’d just dropped me off. At eight in the morning. Which was when school had started for me in high school.

_Fuck._

That one question had answered everything I’d needed to know. My throat closed up, and my eyes started feeling hot.

Hastily, I hung the phone up, plastic hitting plastic loudly.

“Is everything alright?”

I looked over at the receptionist, who sat there looking concerned. “Yeah. Yeah, everything’s fine,” I told her, sounding unconvincing, even to me.

“Well… okay,” she said, skeptically.

I nodded, mechanically walking out of the office and back to the cloth-covered chairs in the building’s front hallway, falling down into one in a daze. My chest hurt, my head hurt, I couldn’t… couldn’t…

Fuck.

I existed here. Not only did I exist, but it seemed everything was the way it had been in 2011.

I had a twin. A clone. No… _I_ was the duplicate. I didn’t belong here.

_Fuck!_

I didn’t always get along the best with my family, but I still loved them. My parents, my younger sister. My sister and I had always had a distant relationship, a five-year age gap has a tendency to do that, plus we were such different people that it made it hard to relate to each other.

It still hurt. It hurt a lot, knowing that it was a small chance I’d ever get a chance to see _my_ parents again. _My_ sister. Because however much my parents were similar here, they wouldn’t be the same. They wouldn’t be the ones I knew. Our relationship had changed in the past five years of my life, between revelations and living alone at college, and it wouldn’t be the same seeing them. It’d be so different.

It’d only hurt more.

And even if I _did_ go to my home here, what would I do? Live at home the rest of my life?

No. I was twenty-two. An adult.

There was also the fact that I had problems being around my parents for too long a time. We just… didn’t mesh well anymore. I was my own person, with my own opinions, and I couldn’t help but see the flaws they had. Not to mention they didn’t particularly treat me the way I liked all the time. Home was a mildly oppressive environment. Not to an extreme, but it still felt like a weight off my shoulders when I was finally able to get away from them once again.

So, no, I didn’t particularly want to go home.

There were also the other considerations: Right now, nobody knew about me. But if that changed, if someone found out that I didn’t belong, things could go really wrong.

The PRT would get involved undoubtedly. Master/Stranger quarantining at the very least. They’d put the facts together once they found out I was genetically identical to my look-ali– to the _real_ me. They knew about alternate realities. They may not know about anyone from another Earth on Bet, but considering the last incident with alternate realities involved the Simurgh, they’d at the very least consider that a possibility and put me under serious watch for the rest of my life.

And if they went through my stuff, found all the information I had…

I didn’t want to live in a cell or under close watch for the rest of my life. Not even considering what Cauldron would do if they ever caught wind of me. I had to stay unnoticed, couldn’t do _anything_ that would draw attention to myself.

God _damn_ it. Fuck. Shit.

…I needed to use the restroom.

I laughed, slightly pathetically.

Well, at least it was an excuse to move.

* * *

My imminent minor meltdown was partially averted by some deep breathing. I was sure I still looked like a mess.

Entering the bathroom, I looked over at the mirror.

Yep, still a–

I froze in place, my blood going cold.

The girl in the mirror wasn’t me. Not the me that I’d seen in the mirror yesterday.

She was too young. Less pronounced facial structure, round cheeks. She looked like she should be in high school.

She looked like me, but _that wasn’t me_. It was my face, my body, but at least five years younger. Too young.

It wasn’t what I was supposed to look like.

This wasn’t who I was.

That wasn’t me.

Running into the corner stall, I dropped my bag and tore my jacket and shirt off, pulling the side-straps of my bra up and feeling around either side of my chest, searching for proof that I was wrong, that I was just seeing things.

But the hard keratin scar tissue I’d gotten on either side of my chest from surgery in senior year was missing, creamy, smooth, unblemished skin in its place.

I was suddenly lightheaded, and fell down onto my knees, not even aware of the hard tile hitting my kneecaps. My hands and feet tingled like they were asleep.

Everything was wrong. This was wrong. It was all wrong.

It was _wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong_.

I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t understand.

It felt like the walls were closing in on me.

I needed air. I wanted it to go away. I didn’t want this.

It wasn’t me. I wanted– I wanted–

The world spun around me in a mix of disorienting color.

I barely managed to make it over to the toilet bowl before I threw up.

* * *

I sat on the floor, but I was breathing too fast. Hyperventilating. I vaguely registered that if I kept it up, I was going to make myself pass out, and that would not be good.

With a degree of conscious effort, I tried to slow my breathing, and managed gulping, hiccuping breaths that eventually evened out, to some degree. I’d started sweating at some point, my skin feeling like it was practically burning.

I was fucking _sixteen_ again. Hormones. Puberty. Teenage angst. Mood-swings like a fucking seesaw.

Fucking brain chemistry.

I scooted over to the wall next to my backpack, resting against it, completely uncaring of how sanitary or unsanitary it was. I simply needed the cool tile against my back to counter how uncomfortably warm I was.

My slower breaths, which had started evening out, regressed, turning into fully hiccuping ones as I finally started silently crying, the sheer, utter, _reality_ of the situation hitting me with the full force of a brick to the head.

This wasn’t a dream or a delusion. This was _real_.

I was stuck. Stranded. In a universe that wasn’t mine, with only my backpack and what I had on me. Nothing else. No other clothes. Not even a fucking _toothbrush_.

I laughed sadly at the absurdity of it.

I was on fucking Earth-Bet, like some self-insert character in the fanfiction I read. Except not, because those were just stories, and this was _real_. I was seemingly sixteen again. I had nothing other than what I had on me. My phone didn’t work, which made sense because neither the IMEI or the nano-sim –which was something that didn’t even fucking exist yet here– were registered with my cell company. My UID and password didn’t work to get on the campus WiFi network because I wasn’t enrolled.

I only had a few hundred dollars. Fifty in the main part of my wallet, and then another one-fifty tucked away in a hidden pocket for emergencies.

I hadn’t been thinking of emergencies quite like _this_ , but I was pretty sure that the situation counted as a fucking emergency. Being stuck on Earth-Bet in any capacity was an emergency.

My thoughts went to Contessa and Cauldron.

They were the favorite scapegoats of the Worm fandom for conspiracies that involved inter-dimensional manipulation, especially considering Contessa’s whole “Path to Victory” power.

But that made _no_ sense, because I knew about Cauldron, I knew about her, I knew about Scion, I knew about fucking _Khepri_ , which confirmed that they did eventually succeed and kill Scion. They wouldn’t need me, just the information I –or rather my _world_ – had. And if she had access to my world, why the fuck would she go to all the trouble of getting someone and de-aging them. As far as I knew, the only one with true time-manipulation powers was Phir Se, and he could only do it for seconds.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.

_Fuck!!_

I was homeless. Destitute. Stuck in upstate New York in the dead-middle of winter. No food, no clothes, barely any money, and unable to ever see my family again, with literally nothing except what I had on my back.

I thought about Jay and maybe staying with them in NYC, since they would put me up without a thought. And then my heart broke as I realized they wouldn’t even know me yet, since I’d met them this coming August.

 _God fucking damn._ My best friend didn’t even know I existed yet.

The tears were back, en mass.

Jay was… well, to put it simply, I loved them. Loved them like a twin, someone who knew me better than myself. We’d been inseparable since the day we’d met, by each other’s side, _literally_ , since day one, doing practically everything together once we were at college.

It was the sort of friendship that lasted a lifetime.

And missing that, realized that that was now _gone_ , was like the worst punch in the gut.

I had other friends, of course, but only two close enough that I would be comfortable asking to stay with, and like Jay, I hadn’t met them yet either.

…Which meant for the first time in my life, I was completely, utterly, _truly_ , on my own.

* * *

Survival mode.

I needed to move forward. I couldn’t pause for a second, or my depression would take over and I’d be lucky to ever get out of it.

I was making a list on my laptop while I sat out in the front hallway of the building, after I’d managed to stop crying after fifteen minutes and just sitting there for another ten. I’d finally used the restroom like I’d first intended, and then washed my hands and rinsed my face with cold water to try and remove the worst traces of my breakdown. My eyes were still a little red.

Anyways, the list went something like:

  1. Get out of upstate New York.
  2. Get to somewhere warmer, where I won’t get frostbite.
  3. Find somewhere to stay (hostel, abandoned building, group home, foster care?)
  4. Get a job and save up.
  5. Find somewhere to live permanently.
  6. Get a _better_ job.
  7. …?



At the back of my mind, though, sat thoughts about Taylor.

Taylor. Taylor _fucking_ Hebert. Skitter. Weaver. Khepri. Our Queen of Escalation and Future Savior of All. Main character of Worm, and someone I had been writing two fanfics about.

But she wasn’t, was she? Not this one, at least. Not yet. This one was just a scared, bullied fifteen year-old girl. If this was truly Earth-Bet (and considering it had fucking _Alexandria_ , I was pretty sure it was) then she had triggered just a little over a month ago, right after Christmas break.

And unlike the versions I had been writing about, this one more than likely (and I really fucking hoped) hadn’t nearly died and been transferred to Arcadia nor was an AI in a body of hyper-advanced quantum-bullshit nanomachines with her emotions and abilities carefully regulated so she didn’t freak out and accidentally the Eastern Seaboard.

Instead, she was simply a scared, bullied fifteen year-old girl with really fucking scary superpowers. …Which didn’t make her situation any better.

She had a will of steel, propped up by her rather childish black-and-white view on heroes and villains. In her mind, using her powers to retaliate against her bullies would make her no better than any other ‘villain’. I could respect that. But it was still a bit childish.

Ugh…

The smart thing to do would be to get off the East Coast entirely, which would get wrecked in Golden Morning, and find someplace nice to live in for the next six years, like Portland or something.

The smart thing to do would be stay as far away as fucking possible from Brockton, which would become an absolute mess in the next few months.

The smart thing to do would be to not get involved in any capacity, to let canon proceed as it should, to not interfere.

Too bad I tended to be ruled by my emotions rather than my head.

It was partly concern for Taylor and her experiences with bullying –which hit _way_ too close to home for me–, and partly absolutely horrid morbid curiosity.

It wasn’t an AU yet. **Yet** (I crossed my fingers). But I could _make_ it one.

I could change _everything_.

I was a naturally curious person, and this was a new world. A _new world_. Something totally different. I had the chance to get involved in something I’d only read about. And that… that was far too tempting a possibility to allow to slip by.

The chance to help Taylor was just icing on the cake.

And I did. I really, really did want to help her. Because I knew what she was going through. I knew what it felt like. I _knew_ how bad it could get. And it fucking _sucked_. Big time.

Bullying was one of those things that you never got over. That never really left you behind.

But really, I just wanted to see everything. To see what it was all really like, to see how I might be able to make things different. It was a bit heady, knowing I had that sort of power. That I could change things on a whim.

I wasn’t so delusional to think I could _fix_ everything. Nope. Fuck that. That’s just fantasy. Bad things were going to happen, that’s how life went. But some things, little things? I could change those. That I could do.

I hoped.

I started searching for Amtrak tickets to Brockton Bay before I had time to talk myself out of it.

* * *

Lunch was bought from one of the on-campus places, and eaten while working on my computer. Unnecessarily expensive, but it was what I had to make do with, and I needed at least one large meal every day until I could establish myself more permanently.

My research told me a lot, but one thing most of all. There’s really no nice way to say it: Earth-Bet was _weird_.

Capes had completely fucked global interaction and changed public mentality. Wars weren’t a thing anymore because of them, for one.

Now, let’s take a moment and dissect that. Wars are horrible, inhuman things. But usually, it doesn’t affect the general public all that much. Taxes and industrial production may change, but unless you’re somehow directly connected to the situation, people can put it out of their mind.

S-class threats? They weren’t even close to the same. They happened _here_. In your face, where you couldn’t forget about it or ignore it. Nilbog was less than a hundred miles away from where I sat. The Slaughterhouse Nine made the news at least once every two months for attacking some town or city in America.

Cape fights occurred daily, and there were news sites dedicated to reporting on them. There was apparently a statistical likelihood that the average person in America would come across one at least three times in their life, just accidentally.

Don’t even get me started on the Endbringers.

And yet… life went on.

People lived, laughed, and loved. The general Level of World Suck might have been higher, but you couldn’t tell just from looking around. Human resilience won out once more, proving that people would get by, no matter what.

Of course, that could just be willful ignorance, but I preferred to try and think positively.

* * *

My train left at five in the fucking morning. And buses from my university only ran downtown until seven.

…Which meant I had to camp out in an Amtrak station overnight.

Well, I _was_ homeless…

Fuck.

Yeah, okay, maybe not the best thing to keep reminding myself about.

Maybe I could search around to see if there were any tech companies in Brockton that were willing to hire a software engineer. Except… one problem with that. Sixteen year-old body. Not my twenty-two year-old one where I could easily pass off having gone to school.

God. This _sucked_.

Like, what the fuck, world? You didn’t just shove me into fucking _Worm_ , you had to make it so my body actually matched when I was?

Fate was such a bitch. Seriously. If you’re reading this, I only have two words: Fuck. You.

One of the buildings on campus (other than the Gym, which required a valid ID) had a shower, and I was able to use that, which made me feel slightly cleaner even if I didn’t have clean clothes. The weirdest thing about that, though? I’d discovered I still had my tattoo on the back of my neck. All four of my ear piercings too, but that had felt so natural that I hadn’t even registered it.

How I managed to have my tattoo and earrings, but not my scar tissue, I didn’t know. I eventually settled on the only thing that explained everything: only organic tissue had been affected. My body was sixteen again, but anything foreign that had been introduced (like ink, or metal) was still where it was.

It was fucking weird.

After spending a couple more hours researching things on my computer, I got on the bus and went downtown, walking the half-block to the train station.

The ticket lady gave me a weird look when I went to buy my ticket. I gave some made-up excuse of being a freshman in college, and that there was a family emergency but I couldn’t fly or drive. I showed her my school ID, being careful not to show her the back, which had the date it had been printed in tiny font alongside other stuff.

She sighed, but gave me my ticket anyways, telling me it would be nine hours until the train left. I nodded and headed over to the waiting area, finding an outlet and pulling out my computer to continue my research on the world.

I needed to know more. Things didn’t match up in my world, and modern history was so different it wasn’t even funny. No Gulf War. No 9/11. No war in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin didn’t even have a Wikipedia page. LGBT rights were so advanced compared to what I knew, probably because of Legend. I didn’t recognize the past seven presidents. The CUI was _completely_ different from the China I knew.

Songs I’d heard, books I’d read, movies I’d watched, hadn’t come out here, and there were others in their place. Fanfiction was still a thing (thank god).

But it was the really obscure stuff that hit me. There was no Large Hadron Collider. No Kazakhstan. The NYC subway system was different because of Behemoth’s attack in ’94.

Thankfully, he’d surfaced in Brooklyn, which meant that Jay should be fine. Or rather, Jay’s parents, since they hadn’t even been born yet. …I really hoped everything else was the same for them, because other-me could seriously use a good friend.

I was determined to make use of the free wifi while I had it, since I didn’t want to use the crappy train wifi. If it even existed in 2011.

I stuck to the Capes category page on Wikipedia, and then switched over to the dedicated wiki associated with PHO, the primary forum for cape things.

There was stuff I didn’t know about there, stuff that the original story had never gone into. Like how many patents Dragon had registered. Or the death toll from Shatterbird’s first scream.

And then there was YouTube. Hundreds of thousands of cape videos. You know that whole three-point-landing thing that all of the movie and TV show characters do even though it’s completely impractical and stupid?

Well, Alexandria does it. And there’s nothing like an amateurish video of Behemoth from forty blocks where he bats some parahuman away at speeds so fast that the camera guy barely has time to refocus and catch the woman doing a three-point landing, tearing up the concrete for half a block, and then have him to realize it’s Alexandria in the half-second before she’s gone, at which point he goes completely apeshit.

…People are so stupid (I mean, filming during an Endbringer attack? WTF?), but I forgive the man, because yes, that was pretty fucking awesome.

The woman may be a lying two-faced monster, but _damn_ does she have presence. There’s only a couple videos with Rebecca the Director in them, but she’s so different from how she holds herself and acts as Alexandria that it’s no wonder people haven’t figured it out.

…The makeup to make her look older and cover up the scar doesn’t hurt either.

But it wasn’t hard to see why Taylor looked up to her as a kid. I probably would have, too. Hell, I probably _did_ , other-me at least.

The other two in the Triumvirate were no different. Beacons of hope, symbols for humanity. Examples of what it meant to be a hero of the highest caliber.

It would mean a lot more to me if I didn’t know what they did behind the scenes.

Nevertheless, I searched around and downloaded a bunch of epubs to read about various topics, history of the PRT, formation of the Protectorate, a couple books on cape psychology, even something by Manton.

I figured as long as I worked to keep my head down, I could survive.

In Brockton Bay. With neo-Nazis and Asian rage dragons and doped-up high assholes. While getting involved with Taylor Hebert.

… Just, just fuck this shit.

I sighed, packing up my laptop and curling around my backpack, leaning my head against the wall next to me to try and get some sleep.

Anything to avoid thinking about the fact that my chances of dying and experiencing serious bodily harm rose exponentially with every step I took to help a single, lonely bullied girl.

_Goddamnit Taylor, you better fucking appreciate this._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear a _lot_. It’s a real thing. Just in case you were wondering. …It’s also not very ladylike at all, according to my parents.
> 
> And yes. While my friends went shopping at the mall or went to the beach or talked about boys (or girls) they were interested in in high school, I… worked on virtual hosting servers and DNS name propogation.
> 
> I was a weird girl.
> 
> ANYWAYS. I am in Worm. It _fucking **sucks**._ Yes it does. I am homeless, quickly running out of cash, and en route to one of the most cape-infested cities in the US.
> 
> Oh boy. /s
> 
> * * *
> 
> **Things in Katherine’s Bag**
> 
>   * Lenovo T440s running Arch Linux. Rolling updates aren’t gonna be happening for a couple years. Good thing my config… um, _seems_ stable.
>   * Laptop charger
>   * Second laptop battery.
>   * Nexus 7 (2013)
>   * Nexus 5X
>   * Galaxy S3 (no SIM) - Old phone, now just used for music.
>   * 2TB WD PocketDrive
>   * 4x USB cables (Micro, Micro3, C to C, C to A)
>   * 2x USB power bricks (one normal, the other USB-C)
>   * Headphones
>   * Wallet 
>     * $120 (After lunch and Amtrak ticket expenses)
>     * State ID, issued May 2011
>     * University ID, issued August 2012
>     * Debit card
>     * Various other shopping and used gift-cards
>     * Passport, because I’m stupid and never took it out like I was supposed to.
>   * Two mechanical pencils, one pen
>   * A white art eraser
>   * Surface stylus
>   * Old prescription (dated April 2016)
> 



End file.
